﻿The Terrible Fracking Effect﻿By James DonahueWe have all been hearing a lot about the use of “fracking” by oil and gas companies to search for pockets of natural gas and crude in the rocks deep below our feet. It is apparently working well for the benefit of the oil and gas companies, but the effect on underground fresh water reservoirs and our environment is another story.To “frack,” the companies use a toxic chemical cocktail that cracks the rocks and exposes the oil and gas. Those chemicals are being kept secret with the help of the U.S. Energy Policy Act approved by our legislators and signed by President Bush in 2005. That act, if you can believe it, exempts the oil and gas companies from the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act. They specifically are exempted from the Underground Injection Control program that gives the EPA the power to control the subsurface emplacement of fluids by well injection and for “propping agents pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas or geothermal production activities.”Until voters wake up and elect state and federal lawmakers who are not reliant on big corporate dollars just to get elected into office . . . you know . . . the ones who flood our television, newspaper and Internet sites with their pre-election advertising campaigns; who use illegal tactics to rig the electronic ballot systems; who gerrymander key voting districts to favor certain candidates . . . our government will continue to be owned by the power brokers.I tend to think of them as gangsters in thousand dollar suits.Because the EPA has had its hands tied over the fracking issue, the Federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) attempted to force the fracking companies to publicly identify the chemicals used in their operations. The BLM established regulations that would have required the oil and gas companies to follow the same standards for general construction and disposal of toxic waste. But there was litigation; the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the Western Energy Alliance and even the governors of several western states joined forces and won a June, 2015 decision by U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl in Wyoming that maintains the Energy Policy Act rules.

Consequently the chemicals being pumped into our precious ground water remain a big corporate secret.To make matters even worse, even the EPA appears to be going along with big oil on this issue. In a recently issued report the agency agreed that fracking “has the potential” for contaminating our drinking water, but it has found “no evidence that the contentious technique of oil and gas extraction has had a widespread effect on the nation’s water supply.”A 2010 documentary “Gasland” portrayed people living close to fracking sites that complained of foul smelling water and some of them suffering from possible ill effects of water contamination. One study estimated that between 25,000 and 30,000 new wells were hydraulically fractured every year between 2011 and 2014. It reported that fracking occurred in about 25 states between 1990 and 2013, and that an estimated 9.4 million people live within a mile of a fracked well. It stated that nearly 7,000 sources of drinking water from public water systems were located in these populated areas.While the fracking companies refuse to tell us what is contained in the fracking fluid, lab samples from well sites have been found to contain formaldehyde, acetic acids, citric acids and boric acids, plus hundreds of other chemicals.One report states that each fracked well uses between two and five million gallons of water from local sources. About half of this water returns to the surface and is stored in tanks for future injection into oil and gas waste wells. No one knows where the other half of the water goes, but your guess is as good as ours. It has to be filtering its way back into underground water aquifers.While the fracking continues unabated . . . mainly because it has been found to be a successful new source of gas and oil . . . the United States as well as the rest of the world now had found new sources of oil and gas, but is quickly running out of fresh drinking water. Fresh water lakes and streams are so polluted by industrial waste that it is now unsafe to eat the fish. City water filtration systems are not keeping up with some of the chemicals, especially nuclear waste that is also finding its way into our fresh water.This writer lives in California where the state and the entire western part of the nation is experiencing a severe drought. Reservoirs are going dry. Water restrictions are in effect everywhere. Watering the lawn and garden, washing the car and even taking long hot showers are considered luxuries we no longer can afford. Meteorologists say the drought appears to be caused by the heating oceans, and may be here to stay.Without good clean water we are doomed to an ugly fate. If the world continues to heat we are doomed to an ugly fate. Does anybody care? This is not even a major issue being discussed in the 2016 presidential campaign now getting underway. The squabbling is mostly over race, guns and who said what about whom.There is a serious need to get away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas as a way to combat global warming, which in turn appears to be caused by an increased amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So why are our “leaders” in Washington shutting their eyes to the issue of fracking?It is easy to see that our elected representatives in Washington are not leading. They are being driven by their pocket books and consequently driving us like a pack of lemmings to the very edge of the cliff to extinction.